I don't agree. I think the professor is just trying to teach people that you can't trust what you read to be true, and test the rigour by which fact-checking actually takes place on the internet (rarely). He's not trying to say 'truth isn't necessary' or anything of the sort.

His cons are generally harmless, and he has revealed them so wheres the net loss? There is a long way between this and someone who actually subversively tries to push his views on others (eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxil_hoax )

I agree that this behaviour is quite objectionable, though for a subtly different reason.

In particular it's not a case of malicious spreading of misinformation, it seems that in the case that the hoax worked the lies were deleted.

Rather it's a case of abusing a public resource. It feels to me somewhat like training a group of school-children to play Rugby on a village bowling green. Sure the damage to the grass will be undone over time, and sure the chance of knocking over any real old ladies is very small; but it's still an irreverent gesture that shows a dangerous lack of respect.

In the real world we have checks to make sure this kind of behaviour doesn't get too out of hand; on the internet we've so far managed to avoid the need. I hope that continues.

That certainly makes sense. But hopefully, since he is in some sense a public figure, we rely on him to make sure the good done is in excess of any damage caused, since he would be censured if that were not the cases. For example, if he had got students to break into museums and make actual changes to historical documents with bleach and ink, he'd make the cons more believable but the harm would be too great.

I don't think he did cross that line though. Some solutions if he did: what if he escrowed (and set a time to release) the pranks in case they aren't caught? What about donating to wikipedia, since it's their green they are mainly playing rugby on?

Yes, I can relate to that but I think the quaint imagery of a village green does not nearly capture the insiduousness of this. He enourages his students to do their best to make the hoax work. Deleting the lies later, while laudable, does not undo the real (intended?) damage to the reputation of the internet.

I really struggle to think of positive educational outcomes from teaching students to pull off successful disinformation exploits.

> Deleting the lies later, while laudable, does not undo the real (intended?) damage to the reputation of the internet

Your problem is that people might start to mistrust things they read on the internet? That's surely the opposite of a problem.

I suspect this professor is one of those people with an axe to grind against Wikipedia and other resources for not being trustworthy enough. Problem is, these kind of tactics would apply to old-fashioned print publications just as well. In the end it all comes down to a matter of trust: the reader has to trust a publication, the publisher has to trust an author, &c. Teaching people to violate that trust can only do harm. His exercises are probably more exciting and sensational this way, but if you ask me it would be more constructive & useful if he asked students to track down and correct surprising inaccuracies for example.

Yes, call me old-fashioned but I just don't like the idea of the internet becoming totally discredited and useless.

You're setting up a false dichotomy. You seem to feel that either the Internet is a place that is 100% trust-worthy (so much so that you can take off your critical-thinking cap), or it's a place where everything is a lie. The point here is that people should learn that they can't blindly believe things just because they read it on the web, not that lies on the web will render it completely useless.

From the article:

> There's also an interesting coda to this convoluted tale. The group researching Brown's Brewery discovered that the placard in front of the Star-Spangled Banner at the National Museum of American History lists an anachronistic name for the building in which it was sewn. They have written to the museum to correct the mistake.

Firstly, I think you are confusing different kinds of lies. Lying is bad for society when it is used to get an unfair advantage, i.e. to commit fraud. But lying in other contexts, for other reasons? If he tells his wife she looks great when, objectively, she's no Helen of Troy, should he also be stripped of tenure?

Secondly, teaching defense against the dark arts generally requires giving the students a working knowledge of the dark arts. Would you object to the publication of Robert Cialdini's Influence on the same basis?

Thirdly, by illustrating how easy it is to damage the free exchange of information, he helps individuals become more resistant to lies and helps the internet develop new ways to fight misinformation. Think of him as a vaccine to the actual 'information terrorists.'

You might be right that lying in research is not legally fraud. It just breaks the academic contract and so people do get stripped of tenure for it alone, not for making money out of it, and rightly so. If you think that this kind of lying is cost-less, you will hardly find anyone who had ever been to a university agreeing with you.

This guy is not teaching defence against the dark arts. He is teaching the dark arts.

I do not object to the publication of anything at all, except of deliberately fabricated lies. Anywhere, with whatever artificially constructed post-justification.

And yes, it is easy. That is exactly why I am concerned and it should not be encouraged.

That's not what I was trying to say :) Generally lying in research isn't okay and I would consider it fraud, since the liar stands to gain by it. But he wasn't lying in order to publish a paper about 19th century serial killers, he was educating some students and some of the internet about not believing everything you read, albeit through deliberate deception.

I don't believe this is wrong, because the end justifies the means. I get the impression we'll therefore have to agree to disagree on most of these points, since our ethical systems are basically incompatible †.

† From your statement "I do not object to the publication of anything at all, except of deliberately fabricated lies. Anywhere, with whatever artificially constructed post-justification."‡ you make it clear that the action is what is important, whereas I would judge on both the motivation and the consequences.

‡ One clarification though, if I may: Do you agree that in this case there is a simple and logical pre-justification (or that one could argue there is one, even if you disagree with it)? Does that make any difference to you, since you specifically call out "artificial" and "post-"?

The end does not justify the means. The means determine the ends.

The professor was not "educating some...about not believing everything you read"; he could do that without creating new hoaxes. Certainly there are plenty to go around.

I disagree. He's not teaching "wrong history", he's teaching students to think outside the box and identify the weak points in the fabric of the internet knowledge base. What they choose to do with these skills is up to them - perhaps they will invent a more powerful citation system for fact checking, or even enhance the security of vulnerable financial processes.

"most of it is produced in good faith by enthusiastic (and sometimes mistaken) individuals exercising their free speech" - citation needed. By definition, you will never know what the biggest lies out there are because they're never exposed, so your assumption that "all" lies are childish mistakes is wrong.

What about those who consult (wikipedia, redit, and wherever prof. Kelly is going to strike next) casually? Do you always go back to see that the information you quickly looked up has not been deleted later by some professor playing games with your credulity?

PS. I never said or assumed that 'all lies are childish mistakes'.

There will always be hackers, and there will always be security experts whose job is to keep the hackers out of the system. But you need to think like a hacker to do a good job.

> teaching wrong history on the internet

That's not at all what he's doing though. The hoaxes are later revealed as such by him, if not sooner by a disbelieving audience.

You seem to view this as though he's permanently altering history books, but I think that's completely erroneous.

> set out to build his carreer on lies

You may wish to turn down the hyperbole, it's obscuring whatever point you have. He's not "building a career" here, he's teaching a class about historical hoaxes. What better way to teach than to demonstrate?

> does he also encourage lies in academic publications?

He's not encouraging lies at all in the first place. He's using carefully crafted lies as, like one of your repliers said, an intellectual vaccine against actual hoaxes.

He's helping inoculate his students and those aware of the hoax against gullibility in the future. How is that not a net benefit?

> I really question prof. Kelly's idea that expanding the skills base in the disinformation field is for the public good.

I think teaching people magic tricks enables them to deconstruct the magic show in front of them. Teaching them how hoaxes are constructed teaches them how to recognize and call them out in the future.

> Clearly it is to disable/discredit/damage/destroy the free exchange of valid information on the internet.

That's not clear at all.

It's interesting, you say "valid information" as if there's a clear way of recognizing information out there as valid. But there isn't. THAT's what his agenda is: how do we tell the real from the fake?

Teaching students about being careful about sources -- online or not -- is good of course. But he should just have shared a paper about or something like that.

I agree with Wales; deliberately putting untruths on Wikipedia is really anti-social behavior. Wikipedia, however imperfect, is a really great asset -- people using it for their own little experiments like this is really doing everyone a great disservice, and I can only imagine how many others he has inspired to do similar things.

> But he should just have shared a paper about or something like that.

Would anyone would have paid attention?

I don't think he is objectionable. In fact, I think he's a great teacher. He manages to not only teach his students, but educate a good portion of internet communities and users.

He seems to me much akin to a whitehat security hacker.

The best way to teach someone to be a security expert is to teach them to crack a system; he is doing an analogous thing, I think.

Where this project goes astray (and I agree that it does) is that his academic and professional community don't seem to have the well-developed concept of "white hat" vs "black hat" that we have here. Translating this into an analogous situation in our primary domain, we're upset because he's teaching them security by leading them through a significant black-hat operation.

The larger problem is, although we can train white-hats by constructing isolated networks and systems to practice on, it's not really possible to construct an isolated system when your "system" is and has to be a social network of actual people.